On the supposed cruelty of natural selection

I have written before about the strong feeling among all sides of the discussion that evolution is somehow cruel. The only difference between creationist and evolutionist is in how people see that cruelty. I do not get it. I have another example of this view that I would like to discuss.

Jason Rosenhouse reviews Ken Miller's Only a Theory and Karl Gilberson's Saving Darwin (here). Both books are by theistic evolutionists, and in both reviews Rosenhouse mentions the cruelty of natural selection. The relevant quotes are below:

Yes, human inevitability would solve the problem of preserving human specialness in the face of evolutionary contingency. But just consider the view of natural history entailed by this. Evolution by natural selection, you see, is an awful process. It is bloody, sadistic, and cruel. It flouts every moral precept we humans hold dear. It recognizes only survival and gene propagation, and even on those rare occasions where you find altruism and non-selfishness you can be certain that blind self-interest is lurking somewhere behind the scenes. All of this suffering, pain and misery, mind you, to reach a foreordained moment when self-awae creature finally appeared. What theological purpose was served by all this bloodsport? If humans were inevitable why didn't God simply fast-forward the tape himself, thereby sparing all of those animals that died horrible deaths in the preceding hundreds of millions of years? Problem of evil, indeed.

and

After all, it is not hard to see why Christians would be uncomfortable with a modern understanding of evolution. Biologist George Williams expressed the basic problem well in his book Plan and Purpose in Nature:

With what other than condemnation is a person with any moral sense supposed to respond to a system in which the ultimate purpose in life is to be better than your neighbor at getting genes into future generations, in which those successful genes provide the message that instructs the development of the next generation, in which that message is always “exploit your environment, including your friends and relatives, so as to maximize our (genes') success,” in which the closest thing to a golden rule is “don't cheat, unless it is likely to provide a net benefit.”

This, for me, is the fundamental difficulty that a theology of evolution must address. It's hardly the only difficulty, but it's an especially big one. A resolution to this problem is always what I am looking for in books by theistic evolutionists.

I simply fail to see the supposed cruelty in natural selection. All of those deaths have occurred whether evolution is true or not. Let's say that a trillion animals died in the U.S. yesterday (a purely arbitrary number). They died whether evolution is correct or not. They died the same horrible deaths, or peaceful deaths. They died by parasitism and predation and starvation and old age and bad luck. The amount of cruelty cannot be in dispute. The creationist and evolutionist agrees there were a trillion deaths and agree how they died. The creationist cannot claim a world that is less cruel. The only question is whether this cruelty produced a genetic change in the population.

There seems to be an assumption that lives are only meaningful if they lead to evolution. If a person dies at the age of 22 without reproducing, it is a tragic death. If that person had children and passed on his genes, the death is no less tragic. If a person has a fulfilling life but has not children, his or her life is not less fulfilling, and if a person has a life filled with misery and cruelty but has many offspring, this doesn't affect the meaning of that life or affect the amount of cruelty.

Let's say that 100,000 years ago there were two men in Africa. One had a good life but was killed by a lion before he could reproduce. The second had a similar life but had genes that allowed him to escape the lion and he did reproduce and died shortly afterwards. The value of each of their lives does not depend on whether they escaped the lion. They were born, lived, and died. Because of the difference, future generations might be more likely to escape lions, but the life of the first man is not somehow worth less and his death not more tragic because of the difference in genes. Nor does it make sense that the life of the first man existed only to help future generations.

The same could be said for every organism that has ever lived. Some died horribly, some not. Some died because of their genes, some did not. Each was born, lived, and died. Genetic change is a side effect of living those lives, not the reason for those lives. You could object to the cruelty itself. You can object to people dying from lions and genetic disease. But that is simply the problem of evil (which is a big problem, but its magnitude is not altered by natural selection). There is nothing uniquely evil or more evil about evolution. There is exactly the same number of deaths and same amount of cruelty whether evolution is correct or not. If we assume that creativity is a good, then we can say that the world with evolution is better than the one without. The both have the same amount of cruelty, but one also has creativity.

The view that selection is cruel could be held if you believe that the only reason for all of those lives was to get to where we are now. The only reason those two men lived was so that we could get genes for escaping lions. One problem with that is figuring out when now is. Are the lives of people who lived 1000 years ago to be seen as existing just for us today? How far back to we go before we say that those deaths were just creating?

Religions don't do well with the vast space and time shown by modern science. They focus on earth of the past few thousand years. But once we grant the billions of years of life on earth, why do we have to see it as only existing for now? Just as the life of a person today can be valuable regardless of whether genes are passed on, why can't the life of an animal 400 million years ago be good in itself? Why must that life be seen as only existing for the future? Each animal lived and died. They didn't give a crap whether they evolved or not. Evolution is simply a by product of living. Evolution is only evil if a person has a theology that sees the only reason for the existence of past life is to create current life. They can even see current life and humans as part of God's plan without seeing all of past life as existing only for the creation of the present (even if that is one of the effects of those lives).

And the fact that evolution is selfish doesn't somehow make its creations less good. I fully admit that I consist of selfish genes, but that doesn't make my life worth less. Our economy is entirely the result of selfish interest, but I still like my job and I enjoy the benefits of that selfish economy.

It seems that creationists, theistic evolutionists, and nontheistic evolutionists all agree on one thing. They all agree that selection as a way of creating is cruel. I honestly just don't see it. It's not that I have an explanation for it, I just don't see what needs explaining. Maybe there are assumptions that I do not have. What am I missing?